If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

The powered flight took a total of about eight and a half minutes. It seemed to me it had gone by in a lash. We had gone from sitting still on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center to traveling at 17,500 miles an hour in that eight and a half minutes. It is still mind-boggling to me. I recall making some statement on the air-to-ground radio for the benefit of my fellow astronauts, who had also been in the program a long time, that it was well worth the wait.

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

We were only on orbit a little over two days so we had no adverse effects from being weightless...

If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67 and that program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us...

When you work really hard for something for a long time it's almost impossible to believe that it's coming true.